Friday, August 24, 2012

Fer-de-Lance

With stunning swiftness, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency said Thursday night it will strip Lance Armstrong of his unprecedented seven Tour de France titles after he dropped his fight against drug charges that threatened his legacy as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.

3 comments:

If the federation is correct--and numerous sources indicate they may be--they need to be going after the testers, not Armstrong.

The drugs Armstrong was accused of taking stay in the blood for weeks, and are distinguishable from natural hormones chemically. So if they were testing Armstrong weekly to monthly, as the total number of tests indicates, they should have found some evidence.

Unless, of course, drug tests are a Potemkin Village meant to pretend things are clean more than an attempt to protect the integrity of the sport.

Whether the truth on drugs can be known or not, I cannot say. But the truth is he won every one of those titles, and we shouldn't allow these petty bureaucrats to rewrite history! Put an asterisk in the book, if you must, but you ought to have definitive proof not only of the drugs, but that they were the singular cause of his victories.

It's like that stupid Penn State ruling, where they rewrote history on the presumption that the sole reason for Joe Paterno's outstanding W/L record was that a few of the boys were molested. With thinking like that, seems like more schools will be trying it. :-(

Lance has been the WADA's white whale for over a decade. There was no one they'd rather catch, and they tried every test they could, at any time of the year and cycling season.To have passed more than 500 tests and gotchas would not only take chemical legerdemain but prescience as well, all while other competitors were routinely snared. I don't think it's beyond the pale that some of these they caught may have been pressured into testifying against him; the influence and authority of the cycling organizations are clear, even if their ethics may be cloudy.

Granted, Armstrong's achievements bordered on the unbelievable and in this age it is natural to be suspicious - yet many others were caught and he never was. If he was cheating, he still beat out all the other cheaters endemic in this Tour de Farce. I honestly don't know, and frankly, don't much care. I know superhuman genetic freaks do exist. I went to elementary and junior high school with Mark Allen, perhaps the greatest triathelete of all time. The things he did in school - seemingly without effort or practice - were regularly amazing, but I am still astounded at the time in 8th grade when he ripped off 200 situps without practice or warm-up for the Presidential fitness test. Giants do walk among us, and I kind of like it that way.